regular. At the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night, his horns are breaking through to shine on the Heaven. On the seventh day to a circle he begins to swell and stretches farther towards the dawn. When the God Shamas (the sun, Shemesh in the Bible) in the horizon of Heaven, in the east, he formed beautifully to shine upon the orbit. Shamas was perfected, and, at the coming of the dawn, Shamas Fourth, fifth should change." Thus reads part of the fifth tablet and sixth days. parallel to the fourth day of the Bible, but somewhat more poetical and indicating an already developed system of astronomy. The sixth tablet is wanting; but here again we may conclude that it contained an account parallel to the fifth Biblical day, since the following seventh of the series contains the account of the creation of land, animals and mighty monsters, corresponding to the sixth day of Genesis. The close of this tablet is badly mutilated; but the word "man is repeated with expressions of admiration, so that the conjecture, that the Chaldean account of the creation like that of Genesis closed with the creation of man in the image of God, is a very reasonable one and fully approved by French and German Assyriologists. We have thus an exact parallelism for the six days of creation, yet it by no means stops short at that. In 1869, Smith discovered an Assyrian almanac, in which each month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh days are set aside for “Days of the rest of the heart,” and Dr. Frederick Delitzsch discovered lately that the very name of Sabbath was applied to those rest-days. In an Assyrian list of synonyms the expression “ Um” and "Nu-uh' Lib-bi" (day of rest for the heart) is explained to mean "Sabbatuv" Sabbath. Of the fall

Seventh day.

The Garden of Eden.

of man we have yet no direct account, but we meet with constant allusions to the sinfulness of man caused by his first parents. We have a tablet containing the curse pronounced upon the first part, in consequence of some transgression, and we have on an ancient Babylonian cylinder a pictorial representation applicable in all its features to the detailed account of the Bible. A man and a woman, sitting opposite each other on either side of a tree from which fruits are hanging, stretch up their hands towards the fruit and a serpent is standing on its tail behind the woman. The identify of the Babylonian province of Gan-Dunias with the Biblical Gan-Eden "Garden of Eden," conjectured by Sir Henry Rawlinson, has been confirmed by Dr. Delitzsch, who further more identified the mystical rivers of Paradise, "Gihon and Pishon." Nor are the Cherubim and the flaming sword guarding the "Tree of Life" wanting, they are found on hundreds of cylinParallelism of ders and signets. The parallelism of the two accounts Genesis with in Genesis with the Chaldean records is complete; not a single feature is omitted. The Chaos in the beginning, the Creation in the six periods in the same sequence, man its crown, the fall and the curse, Paradise with the trees and their guardians, are all found in this remarkable counterpart of Genesis. The legend of the flood, the ark, the fate of Noah, form a second cycle of events in the Chaldean records with a very striking resemblance to the Biblical narrative. The distinguishing feature between the Biblical and the Chaldean accounts seems to be the polytheistic element of the latter and the strict monotheism of the former, but even this difference is largely reduced on a close examination of both accounts. The fundamental religious idea under

the Chaldean records.

Identity of the Chaldee, Henames for the Deity.

brew and Arabic

lying the Chaldean legends is Sabaism, or a worship of the heavenly bodies, and which afterwards developed into a worship of Gods, each having a representation in the celestial sphere. In the Chaldean Pantheon, "Il" stands at the head, the fountain and origin of Deity, equivalent to the Hebrew El, Eloah, with its plural Elohim, and of the Arabic Allah. The word used in the Hebrew text of Genesis, and translated God, is Elohim, a plural, but the verbs and pronouns agreeing with it are all in the singular, excepting in the account of the sixth day. The twenty-sixth verse of the first chapter of Genesis reads, " And Elohim said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." The twenty-seventh verse again returns to the singular by beginning, "So Elohim created the man in his own image, in the image of Elohim created he him." We see then the noun signifying the Deity is plural, but conceived as a unit in its creative power. And now let us look at the first verse of the account of the fourth day and the fifth Chaldean tablet quoted above in full. “It was delightful all that was fixed by the Great Gods (Illinu, Hebrew Elohim), stars their appearance in figures of Animals He arranged." Exactly as in the Hebrew text, the noun is in the plural and the pronoun and verb in the singular, and this is kept up throughout the whole account. Thus, under the test of the linguistic crucible, this difference also gives way, and the identity of the Hebrew and Chaldean accounts, not only in their incidents, but even in their fundamental mythological Chaldean mynotions must be accepted as proven. Nay, we even tions. find that the Israelites worshipped old Chaldean Gods; to which reference is made in Amos V., 26, where the Israelites are reproached for having worshipped Saturn

Identity of the Hebrew and

thological no

(Kiyun) in the wilderness. In the same passage the God Sikkuth, "Your king," is mentioned; this Sikkuth has been identified by Schrâder with the Babylonian Sakkuth, a surname of the God Ninip or Adar (this last. is likewise the name of the twelfth month of the Hebrew calendar). We see then that the Israelites were, in their earlier stages of religious development, Sabaeans, using the Gods of the ancient Chaldeans, and it is, therefore, perfectly natural that they should have the same cosmogony with the Chaldeans and that, when it was found necessary to commit those ancient traditions. to writing, they should use the old Chaldean sources. But, since the originals of these Chaldean accounts. were written in a non-Semitic language, the Akkadian, their transcribers into Hebrew probably used the Assyrian translation of the original, made by order of Assurbanipal. Each transcriber would naturally take from these legends what suited the object he had in view; the Elohist would find that the detailed account of the creation in six days in orderly succession redounded to the greater glory of Elohim, and, as we said above, would prefer to base the observation of the Sabbath upon the close of this grand scheme of creation by Elohim. On the other hand the Yahvistic writer would take what he could find in reference to man in his relation to the Gods, to begin therewith his book of the Covenants for the benefit of his priestly station.

Now, let us see whether the date of the composition Date of com- of the Chaldean originals can be established,—not the position of the Chaldean ac- exact year, indeed, but the period of time later than which they cannot have been committed to writing. In the form in which we have them now their near date

counts of Creation.

can be fixed with absolute certainity. They were found in the Archive chamber of the palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and this greatest of all Assyrian rulers was king from 668 to 626, B. C. The grandest work of his was the institution of the great library of Kouyunjik. This library consisted of clay-tablets inscribed in the Assyrian character of the cuneiform; these inscriptions contained the annals of the kingdom and letters of all sorts, public and private, and the sum and substance of the knowledge of the Assyrians in all branches of the Sciences then existing, and which included finally these legends of the Creation. These last, though written in Assyrian characters, are expressly stated to be translations of older texts. These older texts were in a different language, which is proven in the first place by the character of the proper names, most of which are not translatable nor intelligible by means of the Assyrian language, and then, by the finding of a dictionary and lists of synonyms, prepared in order to make clear the meaning of different words, and embracing the features of the two languages involved. Hence we know that they were written in the so-called Akkadian or Chaldean cuneiform. The texts themselves indicate that they were written at Babylon during the time that there were flourishing kingdoms in what was afterwards called the Babylonian empire; and since that Empire was overthrown by Tugultininip, king of Assyria in 1298 B. C., this date forms our new starting point. Next we have the concurrent testimony of Berosus, and the inscriptions that a foreign people, probably the Arabs, ruled over Chaldea for a period of 245 years. The name of the foreign invader was Hummurabi, whose latest possible date is 1543 B.C., or,